top of page
Search
Writer's pictureJanhvi More

Make Your Cakes More Instagrammable With These Tools



Customize your colors

Jones-Mann creates a vibrant palette for every cake by mixing custom colors each time. She prefers AmeriColor gels (which Wirecutter also preferred after testing them against the competition). To get her signature ’60s and ’70s colors, she sometimes adds a touch of cocoa powder to produce an ivory-based palette for true avocado green.

For pie doughs, Ko prefers natural colors, which she achieves by using natural dyes from pulps and powders of beets, spirulina, and spinach. They tend to look more subtle once the pie is baked. “I’ve seen pie doughs colored with artificial food coloring, and I find that everything winds up looking like Play-Doh and largely unappetizing.”

Ko pairs ingredients and colors that play well off each other, such as sharp pink grapefruit curd with bright yellow mango. “I think about color combinations that will contrast really well but will complement each other in flavor,” she said.



Prep your cakes and frosting

For cakes, start with a clean canvas. Jones-Mann recommends refrigerating a cake to help it set before decorating. Rather than using a fancy cake leveler, she uses a simple serrated knife to make the cake even. She smooths the icing on the sides with a flat-edged bench scraper or the pro baker’s secret weapon, a small offset spatula. “This is my most essential tool,” said Jones-Mann. “If I had to bring one cake tool with me somewhere, I would bring my tiny little offset spatula.”

As for Konofaos, to achieve an impressionistic look in her signature cool colors, she goes to the art aisle of the craft store for a set of tiny palette knives. “You use different-color buttercream and different strokes to make an oil-painted look,” she said.

To create delicate decorations, Konofaos uses the pasta attachment for her stand mixer. “You can roll your fondant through there, or your gum paste if you’re making sugar flowers, and that’s how you get it nice and thin.” Konofaos also uses rolling pins in both marble and wood in different sizes for everything from laminating dough to shaping modeling chocolate.

Jones-Mann works exclusively with a simple buttercream and recommends resting and refrigerating the icing for five minutes if your hand warms and softens the icing. Konofaos, who creates vegan cakes, uses shortening, which remains solid at warmer temperatures.

Konofaos recommends a cast-iron Ateco cake turntable, which has a heavy, sturdy base for easy piping. “It’s beautiful, so if you want to do a nice video of icing a cake but you don’t want to use your plastic one, you can spend a little bit more money.” The cake turntable comes with a single nonslip pad, but you can cut additional pads from a roll of nonslip shelf liner. Use these rounds to line the bottom of the disposable cardboard cake board; doing so will make it easy to transport a cake when it’s done.



Look for inspiration outside of the kitchen

What makes Ko’s work arresting is the contrast between her chosen medium of pie, a food generally presented as rustic and homey, and her unexpected mathematical patterns. Her mood board includes inspiration from outside the kitchen. “Lately I’ve been saving a lot of tile patterns—lots of pictures of showers and bathrooms and floors,” she said.

Konofaos eschews symmetry for designs that include stunningly realistic, hand-molded flowers and painted icings. A former fashion designer, she takes inspiration from the flower arrangements and the prints and flow of fabric she sees on her Instagram feed. “My inspiration lies somewhere between flowers and fashion,” she said.

If you feel intimidated, remember that these bakers managed to turn a hobby into a living by learning from other people who posted on the Internet and shared their own creations. “I’m 100 percent self-taught. I always tell people I went to the university of YouTube,” said Jones-Mann.


0 views0 comments

Recent Posts

See All

Comments


bottom of page